14. Work in Progress

This is a picture of the dress in progress. Mom has tacked the lace panel in, but it is far from finished.

Remember how I mentioned that silk satin can be difficult to work with? My mother backed each piece of silk satin on this dress with a light-weight cotton fabric. She sewed the cotton and silk together by hand, because the silk wouldn't hold it's shape by itself, and to allow all stitching to be done into the underlining rather than the silk. We estimated that she probably sewed .25 of a mile of hand stitches in the dress.

Once she had the backing on, she was able to use the differential feed on her kickass Pfaf sewing machine to sew the pieces together. The differential feed is great because it feeds the fabric from the top, in addition to the feed dogs which feed the fabric through from the bottom. Because both pieces of fabric are being fed through at the same speed at the same time, you often don't even need to pin the fabric together before you sew it.